Henry Mills held on to the shirt that saved his life for the rest of his long life.
It was a dead man s shirt. Likely wrestled off a fallen Confederate soldier on an icy Nashville battlefield in the bitter December of 1864. Mills took the shirt and wrapped it tight around the bleeding bullet wound in his leg.
He lost the leg but kept the shirt. It came home with him to Minnesota first to Fort Snelling, where Lt. Henry L. Mills mustered out of the 7th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, then home to St. Paul.
No matter how many times the Mills family washed the battered shirt, the bloodstains remained. But instead of burning the thing or cutting it into rags so he wouldn t be reminded of the pain and fear of those days, Mills carried this piece of his past into the future.